only a vision of the future. As far as a science of history is concerned, they do, as Shakspeare says, but "smother function in surmise," and to them nothing really "is, but what is

not."

Coming back, after this partial digression, to our main inquiry, we ask, whether such a solution of the historic problem is possible, as shall give us an economy, to which the empires. and crises of humanity do all refer; which has had an orderly growth under the law of progress through conflicts; which is capable of embracing all the great interests of the race, subordinating the natural to the spiritual; and which holds the whole historic drama under a wise and sure guidance toward its adequate consummation? If there be such an economy, in it must be garnered up the destiny of our race, in it is to be found the philosophy of human history.

Take, then, a historic chart of the globe and trace the progress of the human family in its geographic course from East to West, all round the earth; from its origin in the heart of Asia; in both its northern and southern irruptions through the European continent; in its succession of contesting nations around the Mediterranean and on the shores of the Atlantic; across the Atlantic to our own continent; and here still ever westward to our Pacific coast; and through all this geographic march of the nations, encircling the globe, simply ask, what common history has been advancing, what one institution or economy running through and leading the whole race; and to this question there is but one possible answer; and that is, that through the whole history of our earth, as its centre and very soul, runs the history of the Kingdom of Redemption!,

Repeat this process with the great historic empires and states which have sprung into successive being, and ask, for whom was the ancient world prepared; whom did the Jewish people bear in their loins; for whose victorious sway was the whole Roman empire made ready; who is the centre between the ancient and the modern world; who subdued the Roman empire unto Himself, and ruled in both its eastern and its western portions; whose name charmed into civilization the rude German tribes, and has been at the heart of the culture of every modern European state; and to whom was this land.

dedicated in its historic prime, and whose faith has it spread with its growth through all our borders; and to these questions respecting human empires we get a kindred response, and that is, they all take their law and course from Him, who is the divine head of this same Kingdom of Redemption !

If there be any possibility of a true philosophy of human history, if the necessary conditions of such a philosophy are any where realized, they are so, and only so, in the Christian view of human history, in the idea of a divine kingdom, established in the world for its redemption from sin, and looking for its full consummation in an eternal state of being. The history of our earth in its most complete and comprehensive view is the history of that divine kingdom, whose central idea is well described by England's immortal dramatist, in the words,

Why all the souls that are, were forfeit once,

And he that might the vantage best have took,
Found out the remedy.

In the idea of this kingdom, and, so far as we can see, in this alone, do we find realized all the conditions of a right solution of the historic problem. It meets the first of these conditions, since it can be historically traced through all the records of our earth; it is enstamped upon them, forming at once their strength and their glory; it has run its course through every nation, and also survived the greatest of states; and it is now wider spread than ever before. It meets the second of these conditions, and also explains it; for the progress of this divine economy has been a perpetual growth through perpetual conflicts, of which the highest moral antagonism, that of sin and holiness, has been the elementary source, and into which all other conflicts may be resolved. And though states and nations have often been retrograde, and even, to borrow a striking figure, almost literally condemned to death, because sinful, yet still has advanced both by them, and in spite of them, in immortal vigor, that one kingdom of our Lord. And it also fully meets, as does nothing else, the requisitions of the third condition, for it sets before the human family a grand and glorious consummation, in which the natural and the moral interests, while retaining their integrity, and themselves fully developed,

are also made subordinate to the spiritual and eternal welfare of mankind, thus satisfying wants which nature cannot meet, and answering the high questions of our fate to which mere reason and ethics are dumb; and in this way does this divine kingdom set before the whole race an adequate destiny, comprising the highest purposes of infinite justice and benevolence. And this kingdom of redemption, being God's own work and plan, also fully meets the last condition of a right solution of the historic problem, for it assigns an adequate author to the whole historic drama. And being God's plan, all things in it concur and work together; we have one sublime system of things. The facts of history, its law, its aim and its author together make up one scheme: and in this scheme of history the grandeur of the mass of the historic facts is pervaded by a law of progress running along through the whole line of the facts, conducting to an issue commensurate with the greatness of the facts and the sweep of the law, and the facts, the law and the end are presided over by a power adequate to produce what is greatest and best for both God and man.

On strictly philosophical grounds, then, we are forced to seek the true exposition and idea of history in the Kingdom of Redemption. Here only do we find all the conditions of a right solution of the historic problem fully met. The genius of human history is identical with the genius of Christianity. The annals of the race cannot be constructed into an organized unity, there cannot be found in them the successive upholding of a consecutive plan, unless it be in the growth of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Here is the "aliquid inconcussum" amid the fluctuations of the ocean of human life. We know not how any disbeliever in the reality and final supremacy of the Christian faith, can read the history of his race, and not be bewildered, if not convinced, by the vision.

Try to get the angle of vision in which all the lines of historic time converge; there is but one such angle, and it opens an unequalled scene. Spread out the historic canvass, and in its very centre see One sacred Form-for only one of all who have trod our earth, and borne our nature, can be imagined as having a rightful claim to that historic throne-wearing the crown of universal empire upon his suffering and victorious brow.

The light that streams from Him, a calm, divine effulgence, not generated from earthly sources, lends brightness to all that throng around Him, recognizing his regal and beneficent dominion. The whole background of this immortal canvass, which a divine hand has limned, is filled with those, who, with upturned prophetic gaze, await his coming; the progenitor of our race, to whom was given the first evangelic promise, Abraham, the father of the faithful, Moses, the leader and lawgiver of Israel, the long line of Judea's kings, with David as its crown, and of Judea's prophets, most sublime in Isaiah; while standing more remote, yet still expectant, are the representatives of the vast heathen nations, which, by a divine providence, had in many ways been prepared for that glorious Advent, being congregated in one vast empire, pervaded by one predominant speech. And before Him, and all around Him, is gathered the glorious company, the goodly fellowship of those, who for eighteen centuries, in every clime, have received from Him the very law of their spiritual life. There are Paul, and John, and Peter, who, with words of fire and promise, kindled the beacon lights among the nations; there is the imperial Cæsar, who unfolded the radiant cross as the harbinger of victory; there are the Eastern and the Western monarchs of the riven Roman empire, equally confessing the name of Jesus; Christian bishops and patriarchs, lordliest amongst them, those of Constantinople and Rome, bring the homage and fealty of the greatest ancient cities; Leo is there, with adoring gaze, while shaping the ruins of the Western empire, and by his side is standing a rude German warrior, awed into submission to the faith; Charlemagne represents the ninth century, the beginning of medieval times, bearing the crown placed upon his brow in the name of Christ; Hildebrand, the most ambitious of pontiffs; Aquinas, the subtlest of scholastics; Bernard, the most zealous of mystics; Wycliffe and Huss, the progenitors of reform; as well as the knights of a Christian chivalry, Godfrey and Richard of the Lion Heart, and the adventurous explorers of new continents, all meet in that throng, and continue the succession of the faith, through the struggling light and darkness of these middle ages, and all the light they wear is cast upon them from that reverend, central form. And those, too, that may stand on this historic pic

ture, as the impersonations of the kingdoms, tendencies and centuries that since have been; Luther, Calvin, Fenelon and Edwards, as divines; Bacon, Descartes and Schelling, in philosophy; Michel Angelo, Raphael, Milton, Shakspeare, Haydn and Mozart, in the various spheres of art; the combatants in the conflicts engendered by the Reformation; Spain's haughty monarch, ruling Europe's destiny in the sixteenth century; the king of France, prevalent in the seventeenth; England's royal line, triumphant in policy in the eighteenth; and the freer image of Liberty that stands for our own Republic, the wondrous growth of the present age; these forms, which live upon the historic canvass, can you group them all around any other centre, or see them truly in any other light, than that of Him, who is the centre of the Kingdom of Redemption, the rightful Monarch of our earth?

It is He who has ruled historic times, and given them their shape and their law; it is He who has carried the race through the crises of its destiny, that in the consummation of that destiny it might be drawn closer to Himself. The divine right of popes, of kings, and of the people, has been in succession contended for, that the divine right of the Great Head of the Church might be seen to be the rallying-place, and the watchword, for the family of man, in its progress towards the end for which it was made.

And of this vision of human history, it is the triumph and seal, that it is not an imagination or a theory, but the open face of history itself, the legitimate summary and rendering of its facts. And in this point of view it contains the sum, and forms the conclusion of our argument. For Christianity, as has been well said, in its inmost spirit and highest sense, is historical. Its truths are truths of fact, inscribed upon the surface, looking out from the heights and up from the depths of all the annals of our race, so that the whole of human history, according to Edwards' unrivalled scheme, becomes one body of divinity, presenting to us an untroubled mirror of the wisdom of God, and the image of his goodness. And thus is human history the very theodicy of God, a grander apology for the Christian faith than the wisdom of a Butler, or the genius of a Pascal, ever framed.